God's Gift to Women (Faber poetry)

DON PATERSON

God's Gift to Women

faber and faber

3

First published in 1997 by Faber and Faber Limjted Queen Square London WC1N 3AU

Typeset by Wilmaset Ltd, Wirral Prjnted in England by T. ]. International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall All rights reserved © Don Paterson, 1997 The right of Don Paterson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similiar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-571-17762-X

6 8 1097 5

for Steve and Louise

You may have noticed that a dead fish floats on its back? Well, a wooden fish can have this same peculiarity, as you will see if you make this toy. E. M. Goodrick, Fun for One

Further precisions are given concerning the worship of divinities such as Janus, Pecunia, Bacchus, Saturn, Mercury, Mars and Apollo. Obscene rites in honour of the Great Mother are described in some detail. Attempts at a naturalistic revision of paganism are not successful. The gloom is lightened by an atrocious pun. Varro produced a theology full of learned errors. St Augustine, City of God (abridged version): summary of omitted chapters, Book 2, viii-xxiv

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications and anthologies, where many of the poems first appeared: Thumbscrew, Oar, Columbia, TLS, Verse, Poetry Review, The North, Cambridge Poetry, The Sunday Times, The Rialto, Southfields, Klaonica: Poems for Bosnia, Emergency Kit, Soho Square VII: New Scottish Writing, British Council New Writing, Waterstone's Guide to Poetry and How Poets Work. Most of the Dundee-Newtyle poems were broadcast in a film made by Kate Bannatyne for BBC Scotland.

Contents

Prologue I 10.45: Dundee Ward Road 3 Addenda 4 00:00: Law Tunnel 6 from 1001 Nights: The Early Years 8 The Scale of Intensity 9 The Chartres of Gowrie I I I I :00: Baldovan 12 Les Six 14 A Private Bottling 15 To Cut It Short 19 21:00: Baldragon .20 Homesick Paterson, Live at the Blue Bannock, Thurso 2 I The Undead 23 Buggery 24 God's Gift to Women 25 Actaeon 34 01:00: Rosemill 35 The Lover 36 Imperial 37 Poem 38 On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him 39 Little Corona 40 12:00: Dronley 41 The Alexandrian Library, Part II: The Return of the Book 42 Postmodern 5 I 19:00: Auchterhouse 52 from Advice to Young Husbands 53

r 4: 50: Rosekinghall 54 Candlebird 55 Siesta 56 Notes 57

Prologue A poem is a little church, remember, you, its congregation, I, its cantor; so please, no flash, no necking in the pew, or snorting just to let your neighbour know you get the clever stuff, or eyeing the watch, or rustling the wee poke of butterscotch you'd brought to charm the sour edge off the sermon. Be upstanding. Now: let us raise the fucking tone. Today, from this holy place of heightened speech, we will join the berry-bus in its approach to that sunless pit of rancour and alarm where language finds its least prestigious form. Fear not: this is spiritual transport, albeit the less elevated sort; while the coach will limp towards its final stage beyond the snowy graveyard of the page, no one will leave the premises. In hell, the tingle-test is inapplicable, though the sensitives among you may discern the secondary symptoms: light sweats, heartburn,

that sad thrill in the soft part of the instep as you crane your neck to size up the long drop. In the meantime, we will pass round the Big Plate and should it come back slightly underweight you will learn the meaning of the Silent Collection, for our roof leaks, and the organ lacks conviction.

My little church is neither high nor broad, so get your heads down. Let us pray. Oh God

( i)

10.45: Dundee Ward Road

Addenda Scott Paterson, b. - d. Oct. '65

(i)

The Gellyburn is six feet under; they sunk a pipe between its banks, tricked it in and turfed it over. We heard it rush from stank to stank, Ardler Wood to the Caird Estate. Scott said when you crossed the river you saw sparks; if you ran at it something snagged on the line of water. ( ii)

It was Scott who found the one loose knot from the thousand dead eyes in the fence, and inside, the tiny silver lochan with lilies, green rushes, and four swans. A true artist, he set his pitch:

uncorking the little show for tuppence he'd count a minute on his watch while a boy set his eye to the light.

(iii) One week he was early, and turned up at the Foot Clinic in Kemback Street to see a little girl parade before the Indian doctor, stripped down to just her underthings. Now he dreams about her every night working through his stretches: The Mermaid; The Swan; The Tightrope-Walker; Wings. (iv)

They leave the party, arm in arm to a smore so thick, her voice comes to him as if from a small room; their footprints in the creaking snow the love-pact they affirm and reaffirm. Open for fags, the blazing kiosk crowns old Jock in asterisks. He is a saint, and Scott tells him so.

[5]

00:00:

Law Tunnel

(leased to the Scottish Mushroom Company after its closure in I92.7) (i)

In the airy lull between the wars they cut the rails and closed the doors on the stalled freight: crate on crate of blood and earth the shallow berth of the innocents, their long room stale and tense with the same dream (ii)

Strewn among the ragged queue the snoring king and his retinue, Fenrir, Pol Pot, Captain Oates and the leprechauns are the teeth, the bones [6]

and begging-cup of the drunken piper. The rats boiled up below the sleepers (iii) The crippled boy of Hamelin pounds away at the locked mountain waist-deep in thorn and all forlorn, he tries to force the buried doors I will go to my mother

and sing of my shame I will grow up to father

the race of the lame

from

1001

Nights: The Early Years

The male muse is paid in silences. ShahrilZild could not have been bought for less than minor Auschwitz. Erszebet Szanto

Dawn, and I woke up grieving for my arm long dead below the little drunken carcass still shut in her drunk dream. In mine, I recall, I was fixing a stamp in a savings-book, half-full of the same heavenly profile, a vast harem of sisters, each one day younger than the last ... Heaven, to bed the same new wife each night! And I try; but morning always brings her back changed, although I recognise the room: my puddled suit, her dog-eared Kerouac, the snot-stream of a knotted Fetherlite draped on the wineglass. I killed the alarm, then took her head off with the kitchen knife and no more malice than I might a rose for my daily buttonhole. One hand, like a leaf, still flutters in half-hearted valediction. I am presently facing the wall, nose-to-nose with Keanu Reeves. It is a sad reflection.

[8]

The Scale of Intensity I) Not felt. Smoke still rises vertically. In sensitive individuals, deja vu, mild amnesia. Sea like a mirror. 2) Detected by persons at rest or favourably placed, i.e. in

upper Boors, hammocks, cathedrals, etc. Leaves rustle. 3) Light sleepers wake. Glasses chink. Hairpins, paperclips display slight magnetic properties. Irritability. Vibration like passing of light trucks. 4) Small bells ring. Small increase in surface tension and viscosity of certain liquids. Domestic violence. Furniture overturned. 5) Heavy sleepers wake. Pendulum clocks stop. Public demonstrations. Large Bags By. Vibration like passing of heavy trucks. 6) Large bells ring. Bookburning. Aurora visible in daylight

hours. Unprovoked assaults on strangers. Glassware broken. Loose tiles By from roof. 7) Weak chimneys broken off at rooBine. Waves on small

ponds, water turbid with mud. Unprovoked assaults on neighbours. Large static charges built up on windows, mirrors, television screens. 8) Perceptible increase in weight of stationary objects: books, cups, pens heavy to lift. Fall of stucco and some masonry.

Systematic rape of women and young girls. Sand craters. Cracks in wet ground. 9) Small trees uprooted. Bathwater drains in reverse vortex. Wholesale slaughter of religious and ethnic minorities. Conspicuous cracks in ground. Damage to reservoirs and underground pipelines. 10) Large trees uprooted. Measurable tide in puddles, teacups, etc. Torture and rape of small children. Irreparable damage to foundations. Rails bend. Sand shifts horizontally on beaches.

I I) Standing impossible. Widespread self-mutilation. Corposant visible on pylons, lampposts, metal railings. Waves seen on ground surface. Most bridges destroyed. 12) Damage total. Movement of hour hand perceptible. Large rock masses displaced. Sea white.

[10]

The Chartres of Gowrie for T . H .

Late August, say the records, when the gowk-storm shook itself out from a wisp of cloud and sent them flying, their coats over their heads. When every back was turned, the thunder-egg thumped down in an empty barley-field. No witness, then, and so we must imagine everything, from the tiny crystal-stack, its tingling light-code, the clear ripple of tines, the shell snapping awake, the black rock blooming through its heart like boiling tar, to the great organ at dawn thundering away half-a-mile up in the roof, still driving each stone limb to its own extremity and still unmanned, though if we find this hard we may posit the autistic elder brother of Maurice Durufle or Messiaen. Whatever, the reality is this: at Errol, Grange, Longforgan, and St Madoes they stand dumb in their doorframes, all agog at the black ship moored in the sea of corn.

[II]

I I :00:

Baldovan

Base Camp. Horizontal sleet. Two small boys have raised the steel flag of the 20 terminus: me and Ross Mudie are going up the Hilltown for the first time ever on our own. I'm weighing up my spending power: the shillings, tanners, black pennies, florins with bald kings, the cold blazonry of a half-crown, threepenny bits like thick cogs, making them chank together in my pockets. I plan to buy comics, sweeties, and magic tricks. However, I am obscurely worried, as usual, over matters of procedure, the protocol of travel, and keep asking Ross the same questions: where we should sit, when to pull the bell, even if we have enough money for the fare, whispering, Are ye sure? Are ye sure? I cannot know the little good it will do me; the bus will let us down in another country with the wrong streets and streets that suddenly forget their names at crossroads or in building-sites

[12]

and where no one will have heard of the sweets we ask for and the man will shake the coins from our fists onto the counter and call for his wife to come through, come through and see this and if we ever make it home again, the bus will draw into the charred wreck of itself and we will enter the land at the point we left off only our voices sound funny and all the houses are gone and the rain tastes like kelly and black waves fold in very slowly at the foot of Macalpine Road and our sisters and mothers are fifty years dead.

Les Six (i)

with Cocteau (far left); Georges Auric was briefly sent to Coventry following the 'umbrella' incident. (ii)

with Cocteau (second from the left), in the 'Chinese' parlour, chez Laloy. One assumes that Poulenc sneezed. (iii) with Cocteau (centre left): the six friends share a joke at de Beaumont's. Honegger obscured by his own pipesmoke. (iv) with Cocteau (centre right), May'3I. Absent is T ailleferre, by this time heavily enceinte. ( v)

with Cocteau (under piano), rehearsing for Lilith, Milhaud having failed to return from Hammersmith. (vi) with Cocteau (far right): late-night horseplay at Le Boeuf. Durey is represented by his photograph. [q]

A Private Bottling So I will go, then. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you.

Antonio Porchia Back in the same room that an hour ago we had led, lamp by lamp, into the darkness I sit down and turn the radio on low as the last girl on the planet still awake reads a dedication to the ships and puts on a recording of the ocean. I carefully arrange a chain of nips in a big fairy-ring; in each square glass the tincture of a failed geography, its dwindled burns and woodlands, whin-fires, heather, the sklent of its wind and its salty rain, the love-worn habits of its working-folk, the waveform of their speech, and by extension how they sing, make love, or take a joke. So I have a good nose for this sort of thing. Then I will suffer kiss after fierce kiss letting their gold tongues slide along my tongue as each gives up, in turn, its little song of the patient years in glass and sherry-oak, the shy negotiations with the sea, air and earth, the trick of how the peat-smoke was shut inside it, like a black thought.

[IS]

Tonight I toast her with the extinct malts of Ardlussa, Ladyburn and Dalintober and an ancient pledge of passionate indifference: Ochon 0 do dh6;gh me mo chlairsach ar a shon, wishing her health, as I might wish her weather. When the circle is closed and I have drunk myself sober I will tilt the blinds a few degrees, and watch the dawn grow in a glass of liver-salts, wait for the birds, the milk-float's sweet nothings, then slip back to the bed where she lies curled, replace the live egg of her burning ass gently, in the cold nest of my lap, as dead to her as she is to the world.

Here we are again; it is precisely twelve, fifteen, thirty years down the road and one turn higher up the spiral chamber that separates the burnt ale and dark grains of what I know, from what I can remember. Now each glass holds its micro-episode in permanent suspension, like a movie-frame on acetate, until it plays again, revivified by a suave connoisseurship that deepens in the silence and the dark to something like an infinite sensitivity. This is no romantic fantasy: my father used to know a man who'd taste the sea, then leave his nets strung out along the bay because there were no fish in it that day. Everything is in everything else. It is a matter of attunement, as once, through the hiss and backwash,

I steered the dial into the voice of God slightly to the left of Hilversum, half-drowned by some big, blurry waltz the way some stars obscure their dwarf companions for centuries, till someone thinks to look. In the same way, I can isolate the feints of feminine effluvia, carrion, shite, those rogues and toxins only introduced to give the composition a little weight as rough harmonics do the violin-note or Pluto, Cheiron and the lesser saints might do to our lives, for all you know. (By Christ, you would recognise their absence as anyone would testify, having sunk a glass of North British, run off a patent still in some sleet-hammered satellite of Edinburgh: a bleak spirit, no amount of caramel could sweeten or disguise, its after-effect somewhere between a blanket-bath and a sad wanko There is, no doubt, a bar in Lothian where it is sworn upon and swallowed neat by furloughed riggers and the Special Police, men who hate the company of women.)

o whiskies of Long Island and Provence! This little number catches at the throat but is all sweetness in the finish: my tongue trips first through burning brake-fluid, then nicotine, pastis, Diorissimo and wet grass; another is silk sleeves and lip-service with a kick like a smacked puss in a train-station; another, the light charge and the trace of zinc

tap-water picks up at the moon's eclipse. You will know the time I mean by this. Because your singular absence, in your absence, has bred hard, tonight I take the waters with the whole clan: our faceless ushers, bridesmaids, our four Shelties, three now ghosts of ghosts; our douce sons and our lovely loudmouthed daughters who will, by this late hour, be fully grown, perhaps with unborn children of their own. So finally, let me propose a toast: not to love, or life, or real feeling, but to their sentimental residue; to your sweet memory, but not to you. The sun will close its circle in the sky before I close my own, and drain the purely offertory glass that tastes of nothing but silence, burnt dust on the valves, and whisky.

[IS]

To Cut It Short (a companion piece)

And here is the great train three years lat, hirpling into Vladivostok Central. We may infer, from its caterwauling, its sugared windows and scorched livery, the grievous excess of its final night. In a dub a half mile up the track nearby her upturned hostess trolley lies the headless body of Scheherezade whose stories would not tally; besides I had heard the last already.

2 I : 00:

Baldragon

The first kneels in a circle of brown grass, locked on the highest sun, drawing its rays into the mirrored furnace of his body. For days, hardly a crumb has passed his lips, the quicker to advance his dark enquiries. He mouths a name, and notes that he has turned half his right hand gold with nicotine. II-

Inside the middle sun's projection-beam, a rosy aisle from here to Templelands, the middle boy is basking in his fame, and lets his luck break over him in waves. The girl has hooked her thumb in his back pocket. The leaves stir. Her image flickers slightly. II-

The light deserts the War Memorial where the eldest brother crouches like a beggar, one hand to his face, the other out to catch the rain, scattering black coins at his feet. There is a tiny blaze on Gallowshill. II-

Three suns are going down over Baldragon on three brothers, each born three months apart. Here is wisdom: explain to me, if you can, the parable concerning the three brothers.

Homesick Paterson, Live at the Blue Bannock, Thurso So there was me and Lafayette McNab the month before we tore up the West Coast. They'd warned us, mind: this cunt had tried to roast every button-box that played the dub a five-row dude, they said. Wis he fuck: jist a half-a-dozen early Shand licks and the same Scott Skinner riff if he got stuck. His Ma had pit his shed in wi an aix and he'd the sort 0 puss ye'd never tire 0 hittin, but sharp threads: mohair minikilt, wee brogues wi leather tassles. 'Mind if I sit in?' I looks over at McNab. He shrugs. Six numbers later, he's on his fifteenth chorus o 'Kailyard Blues', gien it genius is pain, eyes screwed shut, pretendin tae ignore us. So Eh'm gaun tartan cuin' the head back in when Lafayette stands up, leans over, flashes this big neep gully fae his jacket, slashes the boy's bellows up the middle - chiv posed, erse on stool before his hi-hat's dosed. Meanwhile, he's still dyin 0 constipation but that's soon sorted - cos next big squeeze his box is futterin like a coo's erse, wi the sooneffects tae match. The hoose is on its knees.

Some axe, mind: a 1S Custom Thunderbass, the '62, with triple reeds and rhinestones. White as a sheet, he pits it in his furry case and marches oot. They huvnae seen him since. High Fives, 'Take the A-Road', then a break. So here's me heading for the Vladimir when I gets this waft 0 Consulate. 'Hey ... Hameseek . . . Sure enough, jist the wey Eh'd left her, nursin a half 0 Irn Bru and tequila, fannin hersel doon wi the People's Friend. 'Lang time.' No sae lang's Eh dinna mind. 'Cat goat yer tongue? Ye were aye a queer-like fella ... but wee man, dye ken, you were the best?' 'Sorry doll,' says I. 'Nae requests.'

[22]

The Undead

o Lord, forgive him the ingratitude but should he celebrate their second lease of life tonight, rising bloodless as the moon above the Travel Lodge - his black harp zipped inside his one black wing - to hit the roads again, while she rides out the night, walled up with the corpse on the settee, the dead phone and the frozen wristwatch, frightened as the wife alive again amongst her own grave-goods?

Buggery

At round about four months or so - the time is getting shorter I look down as the face below goes sliding underwater and though I know it's over with and she is miles from me I stay a while to mine the earth for what was lost at sea as if the faces of the drowned might turn up in the harrow: hold me when I hold you down and plough the lonely furrow

God's Gift to Women 'The man seems to be under the impression he is God's gift to womankind: said Arthur. Cradling the enormous, rancid bunch of stock he had brought her, Mary reflected that the Holy Father could no more be depended upon to make an appropriate donation than any other representative of His sex. G. K. Chesterton, 'Gabriel Gale and the Pearl Necklace'

Dundee, and the Magdalen Green. The moon is staring down the sun; one last white javelin inches out of Lucklawhill, and quietly floats to JFK or Reykjavik. Newport comes on with a click like the door-light from an opened fridge. The coal train shivers on the bridge. The east wind blows into his fist; the bare banks rise up, thigh and breast; half-blue, cursing under her breath, the muddy Venus of the Firth lunges through the waterburn. You come: I wish the wind would turn so your face would stay like this, your lips drawn up to blow a kiss

even now, at your martyrdom the window, loose inside its frame, rolls like a drum, but at the last gives out, and you give up the ghost. Meanwhile, our vernacular Atlantis slides below the stars: My Lord's Bank, Carthagena, Flisk go one by one into the dusk. So here we lie, babes in the wood of voluntary orphanhood, left in the dark to bleat and shiver in my leaf-pattern duvet-cover, and where Jakob or Wilhelm ought to stencil in the fatal motto your bandage has un scrolled above our tousled heads. Still, we survive although, for years, the doctors led us back along the trail of bread as if it ran to our rebirth, not our stepmother's frozen hearth; when they'd gone, she'd take us back with big rocks in our haversacks and twice as far in as before. But I keep coming back for more,

and every second Wednesday rehearse the aetiology of this, my current aU-time low at twenty-seven quid a throw. Ten years drawing out the sting have ascertained the following: a model of precocity Christ :It one year, Cain at three (a single blow was all it took; the fucker died inside a week) I'd wed my mother long before she'd think to lock the bathroom door, as much a sly move to defraud my father of his fatherhood as clear the blood-debt with the gift of my right hand; with my left I dealt myself the whole estate and in the same stroke, wiped the slate of my own inheritance. Anyway, as the semi-bastard progeny of a morganatic union (the Mother ranks below the Son), I am the first man and the last: there will be no tide or bequest.

Once, to my own disbelief, I almost took a second wife, and came so close that others slurred our names together as one word, a word she gave, a word I took, a word she conjured with, and broke. So I filled the diary up again with the absences of other men: John's overtime, Jack's training-course, returning in the tiny hours with my head clear as a bullet-hole and a Durex wrapped in toilet roll, the operation so risk-free I'd take my own seed home with me and bury it deep down in the trash, beside the bad fruit and the ash. Thus the cross laid on my shoulder grew light, as I grew harder, colder, and in each subsequent affair became the cross that others bear. Until last night, when I found pain enough to fill the stony grain with that old yearly hurt, as if I might yet burst back into leaf -

o my dear, my 'delicate cutter' pale phlebotomist, blood-Ietterthe back of one, I came home drunk to find you standing at the sink, the steady eye of your own storm feathering up your white forearm with the edge of a Bic Ladyshave and the nonchalance of a Chinese chef next month, when the scars have gone, we'll raid the bank and hit the town, you in that black silk dress, cut low enough to show an inch or so of the opalescent hand-long scar on your left breast. Your mother swore that fumbling along the shelf, you'd pulled the pan down on yourself; but we could see her tipping out the kettle in the carry-cot, one eyebrow arched above your cries as she watched the string of blisters rise to the design that in ten years would mark you her inferior, when all it did was make the one more lovely than its own dear twin,

as if some angel'd shot his come as bright as lit magnesium across your body as you slept. And as you lie here, tightly happed in the track-marked arms of Morpheus, I only wish that I could wish you more than luck as you delay before that white-gloved croupier who offers you the fanned-out pack: a face-card. The fey and sleekit jack. The frame yawns to a living-room. Slim Whitman warbles through the hum of a bad earth. The Green Lady cries over the scene: you, compromised, steadily drawing out the juice of the one man you could not seduce, but his legs are sliding up his shorts, his mouth drops open in its slot and at the point you suss his groans come not from his throat, but your own, it all goes monochrome, and segues into the usual territory. You get up from your knees, nineteen, half-pissed, bleeding through your jeans.

Titless, doll-eyed, party-frocked, your mother, ashen with the shock at this, the regular outrage, pretends to phone the orphanage, gets out your blue valise, and packs it tight with pants and ankle-socks and a pony-book to pass the time on the long ride to the Home. And then the old routine: frogmarched outside to the freezing porch, you'd shiver out the hour until she'd shout you in and make the call; but in your dreams they always come, the four huge whitecoats, masked and dumb with their biros, clipboards and pink slips, the little gibbet of the drip, the quilted coat with one l~ng arm, the napkin soaked in chloroform, the gag, the needle and the van that fires you down the endless lane that ends in mile-high chicken-wire around the silent compound, where a tower-guard rolls a searchlight beam over the crematorium -

Enough. Let's hold you in your dream, leave the radio-alarm mid-digit and unreadable, under the bare bulb in the hall one crane{ly braced against the air, the rain stalled like a chandelier above the roof, the moon sandbanked in Gemini. I have to think. Now. Let us carefully assay that lost soteriology which holds Christ died to free himself, or who slays the dragon or the wolf on the stage of his presexual rescue fantasy, makes the kill not just for her flushed gratitude but for his Father in the gods: somewhere between His lofty blessing and the virgin bride's undressing the light streams from the gates of heaven and all is promised and forgiven. Time and again I blow the dust off this wee psychodrama, just a new face in the victim's role convinced if I can save her soul

I'll save my own. It doesn't work. Whatever difference I make to anyone by daylight is dispatched in that last torpid kiss at the darkening crossroads; from there they go back to their torturers. But if I could put the sleep I lose over you to better use, I'd work the nights as signalman to your bad dreams, wait for that drawnsword sound and the blue wheelsparks, then make the switch before the track flicks left, and curves away to hell ... This once I can, and so I will. The death-camp gates are swinging to to let you leave, not swallow you. They set you down upon a hill. Your case is huge. Your hands are small. The sun opens its golden eye into the blue room of the sky. A black mare nods up to your side. You take her reins, and let her guide you over the sky-blue, trackless heather to the hearth, the Home, your real mother.

Actaeon

I can see him steal upstairs one night, intent on fathoming your private firmament and something, perhaps, of heaven's lottery: marking the flare of (l Clitoridos 'that on dark nights casts a shadow on the bed'; the glittery spokes of the Velocipede;

Feles Avidus; the bristling cluster that they call Hystrix, or the Thousand Sisters; and finally, as he lay there alone beneath those rainy Pleiads and the gone moon of the light-bulb, the starless field where you'd hang him, as a warning to the world.

or :00: Rosemill An age ago, in broad daylight, it flared into the tiny bloom of its own name; now, at even the highest resolution, no map would pick up on this bald scar of shattered masonry and mushy beams, the point of irresistible attraction. I am floating on the back of a dead star between the Vidor dump and the Dighty water, doing it half-asleep and standing up with a black girl who will wear nothing but black. A mile back down the line, the points had slipped to engineer a seamless change of tack and we left the path without our knowing it, reeled in, hooked on our own groins. A field or so away, someone hits the light in the bunk-space of a clapped-out Dormobile: the dog chained to the wheel is going berserk at the white boy being eaten by the dark but I am Rosemill signal-box, my cock the train drawn up the old Balbeuchly Incline by means of ropes and stationary engines to Auchterhouse, where heavy horses stalk the high ridge, four unbroken miles till the ground gives, and we freewheel into Newtyle.

The Lover after Propertius

Poor mortals, with your horoscopes and blood-tests what hope is there for you? Even if the plane lands you safely, why should you not return to your home in flames or ruins, your wife absconded, the children blind and dying in their cots? Even sitting quiet in a locked room the perils are infinite and unforeseeable. Only the lover walks upon the earth careless of what the fates prepare for him: so you step out at the lights, almost as if you half-know that today you are the special one. The woman in the windshield lifting away her frozen cry, a white mask on a stick, reveals herself as grey-eyed Atropos; the sun leaves like a rocket; the sky goes out; the road floods and widens; on the distant kerb the lost souls groan and mew like sad trombones; the ambulance glides up with its black sailwhen somewhere in the other world, she fills your name full of her breath again, and at once you float to your feet: the dark rose on your shirt folds itself away, and you slip back into the crowd, who, being merely human, must remember nothing of this incident. Just one flea-ridden dog chained to the railings, who might be Cerberus, or patient Argos, looks on, knowing the great law you have flouted.

Imperial Is it normal to get this wet? Baby, I'm frightenedI covered her mouth with my own; she lay in my arms till the storm-window brightened and stood at our heads like a stone After months of jaw jaw, determined that neither win ground, or be handed the edge, we gave ourselves up, one to the other like prisoners over a bridge and no trade was ever so fair or so tender; so where was the flaw in the plan, the night we lay down on the flag of surrender and woke on the flag of Japan

Poem after Ladislav Skala

The insolence of it! Ten years on her trail and she writes out of the blue. I'll torch my city flat, move to the black hills and begin the search anew.

On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him for A.G.

Little Corona i.m. Radka Toneff

c: . .. true, but there is, however, often a real event which triggers what Jabes called our endocrine fantasies. For example, there was boy in our village, Goran ... I don't recall his last name, but his family were from way up on the Ukraine border. .. who played peckhorn or euphoniu with the local marching band, and had the most extraordinary skill: he was able to get a tune out of almost anything, and could make a whistle from a piece of macaroni, a zither from a cigarette-packet . .. Once, I remember, he had us all spellbound as he blew the guts from a goose-egg and then fashioned a kind of primitive ocarina, and on this absurdly delicate instrument blew a strange little off-key melody, almost more breath than note . .. I hear it clearly in the lochrian mode of so many of the folk-songs of the region, but this is too co~venient to be more than a trick of memory ... Then this scrawny Orpheus, as soon as he knew we were all drawn into his magic, crushed it in his hand, as if out of pure scorn for us; this trick would always draw an involuntary groan from his audience, and the first time I witnessed it I burst into tears . .. the sudden, immaculate, irrevocable disappearance of both the singer and the song seemed such a terrifying thing I can still see his terrible grin ... from Armonie Pierduta ~i Regasita; Emil Cioran, reprinted in The Aquarian, no. 12113, trans. Tess DiMilo

I2:00:

Dronley

August 20th, 1998, and when I say Dronley, I mean more specifically 351/366 on OS Pathfinder map 338. Meet me in the deciduous part of the forest, but take the east approach, via Bridgefoot and Templelands. Remember, if God's huge hand were to descend from the clouds or the clear skies, straying indolently over these rough forestry pines, they would feel to him as the pale down on your arm does to me now; whereas the tiny blood-tick that negotiates it - look rears and tilts like a land rover. When I was two or three, I used to wake up in tears because my parents had such empty faces ... the two lonely eyes, the solitary mouth ... Many years later, I met a man who explained this to me. Most of us have fallen here. (A few - a merciful few - have climbed.) As every adolescent uniquely observes, it's all infinitely relative, then; but a point can still exist, the notional singularity from which we can take our bearings, and know how late or how early, or from how far or how high, we have come. So we will talk, or will have talked, in what we will think is silence, deepening and deepening as, one by one, the machines hitherto unnoticed by us - shut down: the hay-bailer in the next field; the distant traffic from the city; the earth's own secret engines, and then all the clockwork of the heavens, our words suddenly free in the air, as if they were solid print, then statues, then angels.

The Alexandrian Library Part II: The Return of the Book ForM.D. the bigger fibber Before I set pen to paper, a preparative: I close my eyes and imagine myself in another library, where I am sitting with my eyes closed, imagining myself in this one. Being, like most men, far more impressed by the simulacral than the procession of shabby realia with which we are daily confronted (it being only in the former that we ever truly rejoice in the hand of the creator), upon opening my eyes again I affect a genuine astonishment at the pathologically detailed universe my imagination has brought into being. Of course I have done nothing more than return the world to the world again, which is the same as rendering it to God, or whatever deranged Caesar happens to be holding the reins today ... Fran~ois Aussemain

The level blue gaze of the lovely librarian has wrestled your own to the floor, half-an-hour of her husky insistence finally coaxing from you, like a long-buried skelf, the real reason you can't seem to talk to your father. Beneath the professional concern, you detect something akin to desire; though she must let you work, now, and leaves with a quick little squeeze of the shoulder, sexually neutral, but somehow prolonged enough not to oblige you to write off the much-refined after-hours stockroom scenario as wishful thinking entirely. You keep listening, till the bristling efficiency of her nylons criss-crossing inside her starched whites has shushed the whole place back to silence. The tip of your ballpoint is weeping black ink over the snowy divan of the notepad, as if it were dreaming incontinently of the glories to come, but this is the real thing, and as such it will get the full treatment: the thirty-seven classical stations of courtly love, the hymeneal rites of Byzantine complexity, the Song and the Book and the Film of the Act, its magnification, discussion, rehearsal, its almost-indefinite postponement: for no one has had this idea before -

how you will cherish their tear-stricken faces the morning you fly the stained sheets from the window! While shifting your weight to one buttock, silently breaking the seal on an odourless fart, you split open the vacuum of black Costa Rica; the smell of it, capric, deeply provocative, swims up and wafts itself under your nose like a flick-knife. You refresh your favourite mug, the blue Smarties job with the handle still on. The ghost of your hangover thunders away (like a train; this should go without saying) into the featureless steppes, its heart set on magnetic north; in a couple of hours it will dock in a small town just short of the C}rcle, known dimly, if anyone knows it at all, for its lead-mines, a dangerous method of throat-singing and an ardent liqueur, distilled from white turnips with the taste and appearance of liquid acetylene and its consequent, utterly perfect effacement of perceptual borders; two fingers of this stuff and everything turns into everything else. At midnight, you tattoo the Horseman's Word on the back of your wrist with a pin and a biro, then slip into blissful insentience. In the morning, excluding the state of your trousers, it seems there's no damage to pay; just a stunned vacuity, furred at the edges, as if you looked out at the world through a big hole someone had smashed in your living-room window. A little confused, you spend an hour failing to scrub the word SPONG from your wrist, then set out for a leisurely tour of the second-hand book-stalls.

Around midday, you notice the demon of accidie perched on the steeple, yawning contagiously; you make plans to deal with him, considering, in turn, a propitiatory nap, the dubbed Polish game-show, even, roguishly, the hair of the dog. On the last stroke of noon, he lets fly with the ice-pick you will wear in your head for a fortnight. You've developed the habit, at this hour, of randomly lifting a book from the shelves; here, there are nothing but books about Art, that is to say, books with just pictures; Monday was Twombly, yesterday Watteau, this afternoon, Balthus: brought to the light, the brilliant plan you have unconsciously nursed for the past fifteen minutes turns out to be merely the prospect of having a wank before teatime. You will swither luxuriously over a choice: to swan up, or not, to the top of the building, then the one extra flight to the glassy enclosure you share with the brown-winged, probationary angels, to settle back under the skylight, with Balthus spread out on the tiles, while the pine-scented ozone comes walloping in through the vent. (An atom-sized blowfly goes zipping erratically across the white field of your conscience, too small for conclusive identification.) In the stillness, you make out the delicate jangle of tiny chimes, thin rods of crystal and amethyst threaded on silk; to play them, it strikes you, would feel just like stroking a feather; it is a universe, advanced in its state

of chromatic decay, gently disbanding in the long pole of sunlight that falls from the ceiling, fixing your jotter exactly. Right now, if literature were quantum mechanics you'd be just a sniff from the theory of everythingone breezy reckoning on the back of a beermat and that would be that, fuck Einstein. As it is, with the silence now thickened enough to be workable and the words ranged like tools on an infinite shadow-board, each one on the tip of your tongue (i.e. ranine), it is almost time to begin. The library is losing all faith in itself - a good sign, you know - as if seconds before the wall had sprung back from the floor like a pop-up book to be fingered by God, his hand bracing your shoulder to steady you as he yanks at the tab that sticks out of your head, making your writing arm jerk up and down in big squiggles. Now everything hangs in the balance, as if the whole world could be brought into being by the fact of its clear elocution, as if the planet now hovered and hummed on the brink of the great bimillennial switch of polarities that wiped out the dinosaurs, kick-started the ice-age, knocked up the virgin, and in the next hour will deflect the moon out of its course. Now the last touch: your new toy, 'InfraworldsFor the Gentle Enhancement of Personal Space', a series of ambient soundtracks designed to be superimposed over absolute silence, since virtually nothing is on them.

You have Scottish Renaissance, Cafe Voltaire and Library, though, as usual, you plump for Buenos Aires, Early Evening, I897, firk out the cassette from its soft pastel cover and jiggle it into your Walk man. At first, there seems to be nothing but tape-hiss though it seeps imperceptibly into the white rush of steam from a kettle of mate; through the half-opened casement, a spatter of horse-traffic, the shudders and yawns of a distant bandoneon; from a bar on the opposite side of the street, over the blink of small glasses, two men discuss metaphysics, or literature; from previous listenings you know, in an hour or so, the talk will come round to the subject of women, and then to one girl in particular; and end with the phthisical freshing of metal (you will whack up the volume for this bit), a short protestation that ends in a gurgle, the screak of a chair-leg on ironwood parquet and your man spanking off down an alley. Till then, you will work. The new poem is coming along like a dream: this is the big one, the one that will finally consolidate everything. It is the usual, but different: a series of localized, badly-lit, paradigmatic atrocities seen from a train at the hour between dusk and oblivion, but - 0 his audacity! - rendered as pastoral: the sensitive, paranoid, derelict romance, the only response that is humanly adequate now, at this point at the end of the century;

the song that the rest will all find themselves singing too late, and the words will be yours. You will sue. It is perfect in length, while your witless coevals, all keen, when the big flash goes off, to be caught in the apposite gesture, have spent the last five years conscientiously failing to finish the epic or grinding and polishing four lines of nothing in the desperate hope that the planet will somehow fall into its transparent curves. In the poem you appear as a poet, a real one, with a book out, and two or three gigs in the diary though neither the taxman, your shrink nor the Gas Board is having it. Last week, at the manse for the cosy wee pep-talk arranged by your mother, the minister, somewhere between the sweet sherry and the meat-paste and cucumber sandwiches, leant across, laid his fat paw on your shoulder and whispered For fuck's sake, get real, son. The train in the poem is rushing you ' home as if it remembered what you had forgotten to water or feed or lock up or turn off; perhaps you will find the whole house has been stolen, in its place, just the transom you failed to snib shut; and what parcel of bloodsuckers, slugs and winged beetles will the late second post have chucked up on the doormat the summons, the X-ray results, the week's notice of the warranty sale, the genuine death threats from the jealous, the recently badly-reviewed, the nutter you met at the workshop? Now enter the bit-player you think you remember from the black-and-white Carry-On films, though in your poems

invariably cast as the louche psychopomp widow's peak, wall-eye, BO, the lot. A full set of obsolete dental equipment fills his breast-pocket; trailing a fingertip over the tight row of flame-burs and stylets he pauses over a mildew-pocked speculum with which he will take all the time in the world to find everything wrong with your ticket. You are describing his hand falling down on your shoulder like something to do with a hawk or a lobster when his hand falls down on your shoulder in precisely the manner you failed to describe, and somehow the big switch is made. The lens flies back, offering a view of yourself from above, then the two of you, stiff in a caption of light, the last in a series of bright rooms, some empty, some spartanly furnished with their little vignette, like an unfinished strip-cartoon of which you are dearly the punchline; then plunges away through the abstracted night till the train is no more than the pulsating hyphen in London - Brighton, a jittery point of no ascertainable hue or dimension that resolves as the glint in his good eye, has a half-hearted stab at a twinkle, then fails. And there, on the page, is the lovely librarian, the coffee so vividly drawn you could smell it were it not for the audible whine of his meters, his skidmarks and forty years' Kensitas that admits of no other alternative.

They have let you go home. You sit in the dark, count slowly up to fifty, then switch on that absolute moron, the anglepoise: with a sputter of wet wood, the back of your head explodes in slow motion; through the axehead of sparks come the horror-waves no one has ever conveyed without buggering with the typography: your writing is almost entirely illegible, and you will never know, since you cannot remember whether you'd sat in the train or the library, if it was the page, or your hand shaking.

ENVOI

Someone appears to be using your mouth to scream through: you shut it abruptly, oddly relieved to discover the neighbours pounding the wall, in concern or annoyance; unfortunately, your house is semi-detached, that is the gable-end, this is the first floor, and, with a bang and a fizz, here ;s a door where no door was before and where the door was no door ;s

[so]

Postmodern Boy gets haud 0' this porno movie, heavy Swedish number, broon-wrapper joab, like. Waants tae mak a copy 0' it but he's only got the ae video machine. So he thinks: Eh ken. Gets oot the camcorder that's been lehn gaitherin stoor in the cupboard since last Christmas, sets it up on a wee table right opposite the teUy, lines up the screen in the eyepiece. Nae bather. Lets it roll. When it's feenished he checks the start 0' the copy jist tae mak sure it's recorded okay. Nae sweat. Dead chuffed wi' hisel. Taks it doon the pub that night and lends it tae his pal, then his pal borrys it, exetera exetera. A fortnight later a' cunt in the pub's seen it, and some boy he disnae ken hands it back to him, funny smile on his puss. Thinks nothin' 0' it tho. Onywiy, three weeks later, the boy thinks, Ach, the wife's oot, Eh'U hae another squint at thon video again. Same as before, oot wi' the big box 0' Scotties, the wife's cocoa-butter, slaps in the video, settles back in the settee, breeks doon, cock oot. So he's sittin' there gien it big licks, a' these Swedes gien it laldy on the telly, when he notices the reflection 0' himsel, wankin awa on the screen, clear as day. Then he stops wankin. But his reflection disnae. That's cuz it's no' his fuckin reflection. He's only jist taped himsel haein a wank, huzzee. Dye no' get it? Will Eh hae tae explain it tae ye?

[51]

I9:00: Auchterhouse

My pulse clicks in my throat, so hard it hurts. The Sunshine Coach will never break through, stalled for ever on its sad trawl of the schemes, each rain-dark tenement surrendering up its palest child. Laid out for little games, the big house waits with us: one student nurse and one fourteen-year-old, his forage cap ablaze with badges: First Aid; Hygiene; Fire Drill. Gail is lightly braced against the sink, her face burning, her skirt bunched round her middle while I try to effect the painless removal of the inch-long skelf, buried in her flank. I will not be disturbed; this is heart surgery, and might well take me an eternity.

from Advice to Young Husbands No one slips into the same woman twice: heaven is the innocence of its beholding. From stroke to stroke, we exchange one bliss wholly for another. Imagine the unfolding river-lotus, how it duplicates the singular perfection of itself through the packed bud of its billion petticoats, and your cock, here, the rapt and silent witness, as disbelief flowers from his disbelief. Heaven is the innocence of its beholding: no man slips into the same woman twice.

I

4: 50: Rosekinghall

(Beeching Memorial Railway, Forfarshire Division)

The next train on Platform 6 will be the I4: 50 Rosekinghall - Gallowshill and Blindwell, calling at: Fairygreen - Templelands - Stars of Forthneth - SilverwellsHoneyhole - Bee ~()tt - Pleasance - Sunnyblink Butterglen - Heatheryhaugh - St Bride's Ring - Diltie MossSilvie - Leyshade - Bourtreebush - Little Fithie Dusty Drum - Spiral Wood - Wandershiell- WindygatesRed Roofs - Ark Hill - Egypt - Formal Letter - Laverockhall - Windyedge - Catchpenny Framedrum - Drumtick - Little Fardle - Packhorse Carrot - Clatteringbrigs - Smyrna - Bucklerheads Outfield - Jericho - Horn - Roughstones Loak - Skitchen - Sturt - Oathlaw WolBaw - Farnought - Drunkendubs - Stronetic Ironharrow Well- Goats - Tarbrax - DameyeDummiesholes - Caldhame - Hagmuir - Slug of AuchrannieBaldragon - Thorn - Wreaths - Spurn HillDrowndubs - The Bloody Inches - Halfway - Groan, where the train will divide

Candlebird* after Abbas Ibn Al-Ahnaf, C.750

If, tonight, she scorns me for my song, You may be sure of this: within the year Another man will say this verse to her And she will yield to him for its sad sweetness. '''Then I am like the candlebird,'" he'll continue, After explaining what a candle bird is, '''Whose lifeless eyes see nothing and see all, Lighting their small room with my burning tongue; His shadow rears above hers on the wall As hour by hour, I pass into the air." Take my hand. Now tell me: flesh or tallow? Which I am tonight, I leave to you.' So take my hand and tell me, flesh or tallow. Which man I am tonight I leave to you.

"Generic name for several species of seabird, the flesh of which is so saturated in oil the whole bird can be threaded with a wick and burnt entire

[55 ]

Siesta i.m. Abel Martin

Now that, halfway home, the fire-fish swims between the cypress and that highest blue into which the blind boy lately flew in his white stone, and with the ivory poem of the cicada ringing hollow in the elm, let us praise the Lord the black print of his good hand! - who has declared this silence in the pandemonium. To the God of absence and of aftermath, of the anchor in the sea, the brimming sea ... whose truant omnipresence sets us free from this world, and firmly on the one true path, with our cup of shadows overflowing, with our hearts uplifted, heavy and half-starved, let us honour Him who made the Void, and carved these few words from the thin air of our faith. after Antonio Machado

[56]

Notes

Some of the poems take their titles from the stations of the old Dundee-Newtyle railway (motto: 'Private Enterprise for the Public Good'), which was eventually dismantled in the 1960s as part of Dr Beeching's programme of rationalisation.

Homesick Paterson button-box - button accordion; shed - hair parting; aix - axe; puss (rhymes with fuss) - face; head - theme; gully - knife; posed - hidden; axe - musical instrument; Vladimir toilet The Chartres of Gowrie In the late eighteenth century a local seer, one Thomas Cairnie of Inchture, continually predicted the founding of a great kirk in the Carse of Gowrie that would rival those of Chartres or Cologne. It did not materialise. The Alexandrian Library, Part II: The Return of the Book The Aussemain quotation is from Journals, I894-99, and is preceded by the following passage: Only when our breath finally fails to cloud the glass shall we apprehend with absolute perspicacity - if only for a few seconds - the true nature of the paradise into which we were born, with each object as an angel, finally freed from its Adamite taxonomy, its adamantine mirror. We inhabit a world of impregnable reflections . .. even if, by the child's expedient of arranging two mirrors so as to face one another, we lead the world and its surfaces to their own subtle destruction, we can never find the viewpoint discreet enough to witness the miracle taking place; at the last, it is always the sight of our own idiotic heads peering over the parapet that obscures the vista. Staring into the eyes of

the beloved, we sometimes feel on the threshold of an infinite understanding and tenderness until it dawns on us that we are focused on nothing other than our own tiny, foolish faces, absurdly bloated as on the back of a spoon. The lover, in the act of lovemaking, thinks he is continually on the verge of breaking free, but is always frustrated - his partner is the mirrored door that both shows the way to eternity, and stands implacable guard upon it. Only the poet can swim in these terrible shallows ... he is like a swan feeding on a crystalline lake, his reflection immaculate, his head cancelled utterly as he dives into himself ... dredging the dark underworld for mysteries small enough to carry back, concealed and intact, in his mouth.

[58]

(ix) 02:50: Newtyle

Of this white page, ask no more sense than of the skies (though you may believe the rain His tears, the wind His grief, the snow His shredded evidence